Who ‘won’ Chinese New Year?: winners and losers in Hong Kong
Did The Peninsula ‘beat’ the Mandarin Oriental? And who came out on top - Times Square or Harbour City? Instagram data shines a light on Hongkongers’ behaviour over Lunar New Year
For all the celebrations and good cheer, Lunar New Year also has its winners and losers. Where do we shop? Which restaurants do we eat in? Who do we choose to celebrate with? To find out who “won” Lunar New Year 2018, digital marketing agency Digitas turned to that modern barometer of social behaviour, Instagram.
“Each time you post from your smartphone to Instagram, you are not only uploading a photo, but also additional data: information such as where you were standing when you took the shot, the hashtag used and the time you posted are all recorded,” says David Atkins, strategy director at Digitas Hong Kong.
In fact, each post contains about 55 data points, and that is before looking at the content of the photos – including faces and objects – that can now be analysed via machine learning.
Taken individually, such images mean little, says Atkins, but viewed collectively, they provide a greater understanding of how people live their lives.
Working with social content marketing platform Stackla, Digitas was able to collate Instagram posts from across Hong Kong during the holiday period with hashtags relating to Lunar New Year. By running them through Google’s Vision platform, the agency identified nearly half a million data points from 7,450 Instagram posts.